Okay, so my friend, who is an extremely financially challenged (but very sharp) graphics programmer has spent his whole life programming on essentially salvage grade computers (old pentiums/k5s) with absolutely no graphics acceleration. However, he's just come into a very, very nice Athlon X2 3600+ machine ( I gave it to him ) -- however, it has a GeForce 6150SE integrated piece of ****. He really, really wants to start writing some 3D accelerated, modern code (he's been reading about all these advanced algorithms online), but he doesn't have the hardware to write it and actually enjoy it.

So, I was wondering, does anyone here have a semi-decent/decent PCI-express video card that they'd like to donate to my friend? I don't have any spare PCI-E cards, so I can't help him, and I'm broke too...

The 8500GT is dirt cheap for a DirectX 10 card. It isn't a screaming fast gaming card but if he wants to program with the latest graphics features he's going to want a DX10 card and this one should be fast enough to mess around with.

I hate to say this, because I do pity your friend... But if he's looking to get into programing graphics . . . then the integrated card is just fine for whatever he puts out. Honestly, its not really even possible to code something equivalent to quake 3 by yourself anymore. The engines that are complex take forever to code (4-6 year turnover with teams working on it), so even if he did get a slightly better graphics card, it wouldn't matter.

Not to mention, if he can make code run on integrated graphics, then it will run even better on discrete graphics! Smart developers will code on hardware that is not too fast just so that they know it will run better on real machines. HL2 was coded with workstations with geforce 4 cards, a whole generation behind (almost two by the time it came out).

Haha, you're right, Absolution. I mean, I have a Core 2 Quad + GeForce 8800GT, but I also have a separate development workstation which consists of a Pentium IV 1.6GHz and a GeForce 3. Obviously, that's not too bad, but it's certainly not "new".

It's interesting to see my code fly on my Core 2 because I spent so much time optimizing for the Pentium IV. Maybe my friend will just have to stick with his machine and just learn to write really kickass software routines that do the modern stuff that he wants to see